There are now not one but three great stories the major media outlets are ignoring in the John Edwards scandal. Has there ever been a comparable instance of such broad alignment in the face of such extreme inevitability?

How does the media come out of this not looking ridiculous?

Will Howard Kurtz ever touch the story?

And who does John Edwards have to fuck to get some ink?

(The best place to keep up on this story is Kausfiles.)

Here are the three separate strains:

1) Did John Edwards have an affair during his presidential campaign and get a campaign contractor pregnant while his wife was battling cancer?
2) What lies behind the predatory tactics of the National Enquirer—A personal vendetta? Political payback? Or just perverse but nonetheless pure dogged journalistic iconoclasm?
3) Why did the mainstream press—by which I mean the nation’s leading newspapers and the political cable channels—all come to the same decision not to run with this story?

Not a conspiracy—but it is a devastating illustration of a similar mindset. Now, there are a million stories the media doesn’t cover and of course it’s not required to publish anything. But it is fair to implicate it in this instance, for two reasons:

a)    We’ve seen the gassily trivial and grimily prurient matters that generate such verbiage on print and on the talk shows. Hard to see how not even one of those three strains reach that bar. The first is a dramatic tale of high-stakes political gamesmanship. The second is a feature story of no little meat. And isn’t the third an intriguing sociological mystery?
b)    I’ve been a media editor for many years and can tell you where the vast percentage of “media coverage” comes from. A big story breaks. Cue some upper editor, affecting sagacity and sucking on an imaginary journalistic pipe: “We should really take a look at the media coverage of this!” There was no actual story to do that a reader might find interesting, just, “Let’s take a look at the media coverage!” That’s “media writing” in the most insipid, Howard Kurtzian sense of the term. In this context, when a guy who a lot of folks thought might be president is nailed with a love child, has an physical confrontation with a team of tabloid reporters that ends up with him barricaded in a basement bathroom of a Beverly Hills luxury hotel, and the media doesn’t report it, that it does not warrant coverage in the mainstream media suggests a breakdown in journalistic sensibility at some high levels.

What’s behind that breakdown? A puzzlement! Ideas:

1) The Ick Factor. It’s an unappetizing story. If it’s true, there’s a cancer-stricken wife publicly humiliated; what may be an unsettlingly elaborate cover-up on Edwards’ part; a child (whose name has already been published) who may grow up in a distastefully public environment ….

2) They’re chicken. Timidity and parochialism and prudishness reign in the modern newsroom. It may seem like the cable channels go for outrageousness, but of course, they have their established tropes—hurricanes, political gaffes, dead blondes—and don’t like getting out of them. And inside, there are some loud voices saying…

3) “It’s unproven.” This is a bit of risible sophistry—that’s a condition that would vaporize most cable discussions, for one. Those who use this argument are either playing on ignorance about the Enquirer or haven’t read the actual stories. A recurring tactic of the cable yaposphere in the Karl Rove-Fox News era is bland denial in the face of the obvious. There’s a famous Onion story about Barry Bonds—“Barry Bonds Took Steroids, Reports Everyone Who Has Ever Watched Baseball.” (Bonds’ status as a steroid user remains unproven as well.) The details in the Enquirer story are laid out clearly enough that they could be fodder for, if nothing else, a debunking story. “But,” someone will say…

4) “… it’s a private matter.” These same outlets delve deeply into people’s private lives every day, never more so than when the people in question have products to sell, generally books detailing past bad behavior. (The modern news media excels at assuring us celebrities are no longer doing things they, the media, didn’t tell us the celebs were doing at the time.) This one, too, has an odd feel to it. How is it private? Edwards was running for president. If the story is true, he was subjecting himself to blackmail, risking the election for the party (if it came out between the convention and the election), possibly even creating a political or constitutional crisis (if he was elected and had to resign before he took office). And then there’s the character issue. The problem with Bill Clinton is that he wasn’t carrying on a discrete affair with an ambassador’s wife. He was boffing an intern in the Oval Office. In both cases, the reckless private behavior created political (which is to say public) risks of some import. Clinton’s arguably cost Gore the election.

5) The one other argument against publishing the two ancillary stories is that they de facto involve publishing the first. This is an intellectually coherent point, but it suffers from the sin of lack of perspective. You don’t withhold news and damage your reputation by adhering to the nth degree to what are supposed to be general rules, particularly when those rules are hypocritical and inconsistent in the first place. And this argument reveals the impotence of the pre-internets media mindset; are they really not smart enough to co-opt the competition? What does this debacle do but expose their timidity?

In the meantime, the story is getting worse. The Enquirer is now reporting the details of what it says is a “hush money” payoff scheme of $15,000 a month to Hunter, through a wealthy friends of Edwards’. And the McClatchy newspapers have seen the child’s birth certificate, and have published her name. The report says there was no father listed on the certificate, though Hunter has publicly said the father is Andrew Young, a former campaign finance manager for Edwards’ presidential campaign.

Update: I just thought of a fourth angle! Why have the mainstream media critics gone silent? Why doesn’t Howard Kurtz do a story about why Howard Kurtz hasn’t looked into why the mainstream media hasn’t covered the story?